Twenty five years and a few days ago, the Oslo Accords were signed and United States President Bill Clinton, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzḥak Rabin, and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat took that famous picture shaking hands. The Israeli and Palestinian populations had been convinced – through very successful propaganda campaigns – that this was finally the beginning of peace.
Let’s take a look at what’s happened since September 1993.
Upwards of 10,000 Israelis and Palestinians have been killed. A giant concrete wall was erected – complete with a network of military checkpoints – cutting through the cradle of Jewish civilization, imposing harsh restrictions on Palestinians, and forcibly separating the two populations. Peace seems less attainable than ever and both peoples are confronted with seemingly insurmountable challenges.
Oslo’s promises of peace have not been fulfilled, which shouldn’t surprise anyone as it rested on false assumptions regarding both peoples. By now the world should know that in the Semitic region, peace doesn’t come through imposing Western nation-state structures and drawing neat lines that separate peoples from their identities and sacred lands.
According to the accords, Israel was meant to relinquish the cradle of Jewish civilization. And Palestinians were meant to forget about the locations most central to their grievances and aspirations since 1948.
In fact, all Oslo succeeded in doing was making a bad situation worse and fixing the notion of a two-state solution deeply into the hearts and minds of the Israeli and Palestinian majorities.
The two-state solution doesn’t work. It was tried several times – the situation became worse. We continued to try it – same outcome. What’s that famous definition of insanity? Oh, right. Trying the same thing over and over (and over and over) again, expecting a different outcome.
But here’s the thing – I don’t think that anyone at the top putting these two-state plans together is expecting a different outcome. Many important people – Israelis, Palestinians, and foreigners – have significant monetary and political incentives to ensure things never improve here.
As disgusting and inhumane as it is, I can intellectually understand why these people want to keep pumping out two-state plans that will lock us into perpetual war. What I don’t get is why anyone not directly benefiting from the conflict can support this – what could the public possibly think will change the next time around?
And while we’re wasting time, money, and blood on something that’s doomed to fail, what we’re not doing is even worse. We’re not dedicating any of these resources towards finding solutions that could actually work.
If there’s one thing we should learn from Oslo, it’s that we need to run, and run fast, away from the two-state solution in all of its forms so that we can start working on solutions that might actually achieve genuine peace.
